Crash Course 2014: Synthesis (Savitri Lopez Negrete & Jani Harnish, RKS)

LA SERVICE JAM | MARCH 8, 2014

Synthesis

RKS is an innovation and design consulting firm delivering

human focused solutions with global impact. Founded in

1980, RKS utilizes design as a strategic tool advancing

client’s ability to focus on people’s needs and aspirations.

WHO WE ARE

RKS is headquartered in Thousand Oaks, in the heart of the

beautiful Santa Monica Mountains. RKS recently opened a

satellite office at Cross Campus, a high energy,

collaborative environment at the center of Silicon Beach.

WHERE WE ARE

WHY SYNTHESIZE?

"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did

something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw

something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were

able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things.”

-Steve Jobs

TOOLS

Identifying insights & patterns

Affinity Mapping helps to categorize the vast array of findings gathered during

the research phase thus developing strategic areas for further brainstorming.

We use Affinity Mapping as a tool to cluster raw findings into relational

groupings that emerge as patterns and themes.

AFFINITY MAPPING

1. Visualize your key insights. Use post-its to capture your research findings

2. Collaborate. As you put your post-its up on the wall, read out loud to your

team to maintain a high level understanding

3. Identify patterns that arise in your findings and cluster them accordingly

4. Name your groupings as overarching themes

AFFINITY MAPPING

Creating Personas

A persona is an insight cluster that is formed balancing demographic data and

psychographic attributes to communicate the most relevant research insights.

Personas are created to cover a broad spectrum of key players in the service

ecosystem. We use this tool to empathize with users and understand multiple

perspectives that will drive a service innovation. Personas also anchor and

depict real human needs for the creation of your service offering.

PERSONAS

1. Identify the players in your service ecosystem – service providers,

consumers and/or stakeholders

2. Select 3 relevant players and briefly describe them.

3. Make them real. Give this persona a name, age, profession, income, family,

needs, values, aspirations and challenges.

4. Enlist circumstances in the service offering that prevent them from reaching

their full potential

5. Create personas with extreme challenges to test a range of different use

cases for your service

CREATING PERSONAS

User Experience Mapping

A User Experience Journey begins before a service is used and continues after

the user’s engaged with that offering. This tool is used to map out critical

moments in the user’s journey to identify opportunities for improvement with the

greatest impact and meaning for users. We use this method to identify key

steps in the process, the tangible and intangible touchpoints and emotional

highs and lows throughout the experience. This tool lays the foundation for

opportunity areas to emerge.

EXPERIENCE MAPPING

1. Based on your research, write (visualize) each step in the service, 7-10

crucial activities (hint: the journey begins before the service begins and

continues even after the service is used)

2. Make sure to integrate activities that are unique to each persona

3. Discuss and identify the key activities that need the most improvement and

you would like to focus on

CREATING A USER EXPERIENCE MAP

1. Create an Emotional Spectrum - the emotional highs and lows in the existing

experience that you observed during the research

2. Discuss and identify the key activities that need the most improvement and

your team would like to focus on

CREATING A USER EXPERIENCE MAP

Role Playing

Role playing is acting out a scenario to better understand the user experience.

Each team member becomes a player in the existing service ecosystem,

learning about individual motivations, challenges and needs as well as

relationships that emerge from the service context through the physical

enactment.

ROLE PLAYING

1. Assign each team member a role or persona and act out some of the key

activities your team chose in the User Experience Journey

2. Use props and the environment to help you role play your chosen persona

HOW TO ROLE PLAY

1. Capture (through photos, post its or sketches) key moments that can be

improved and write them as Help Me statements – don’t forget to note which

parts of the service are working well too!

2. Identify the key Help Me statements that can transform your service

experience

CREATING A USER EXPERIENCE MAP

Opportunity areas: Psycho-aesthetics Mapping

Psycho-aesthetics is RKS’ proprietary framework adapted from Abraham

Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs,” to strategically frame meaningful consumer

experiences and game changing business opportunities. This framework

enables the translation of peoples’ desires into visual context while providing

direction for innovation teams throughout the process of a project.

We use it to map consumer segments, position products, services and brands,

analyze industry landscapes and to frame new business opportunities.

WHAT IS PSYCHO-AESTHETICS?

1. Think about existing competitive offerings that relate to your service

2. Map out the existing offerings relative each other on map – least interactive

to most interactive

3. Keeping your key persona in mind, think about how your service can

address their needs better than existing competitors. “It’s not how you feel

about the design or experience, it’s how it makes you feel about yourself”

4. Based on competitors and your persona’s aspirations, identify the

positioning of your opportunity zone

HOW TO USE IT

What we saw-

Flow your thinking in the following order:

Insights are derived from asking Why’s?

Actionable directions are derived from asking How’s?

TIPS

What did we see? What did we learn?What does it mean for

our service offering?

How do we change

the service offering?